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Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales Wants to Have His Cake and Eat it too!

posted on July 30, 2007

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales would like you to help him build the revenue for his new “for profit” venture Wikia. Wikia has acquired the distributed crawler Grub from LookSmart and Wales plans to make it open source. He’d like to invite the community to line his coffers.

In case you need a better understanding of Wales’ plans, he explains his motives:

“Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken,” Wales said back in December 2006, when Wikia launched Search Wikia effort. “Why is it broken? It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability, lack of transparency.”

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Google Bribing the Next President of the United States?

posted on July 30, 2007

How do you make sure your company is fondly remembered by the next president of the United States of America? Simple; invite them to the Googleplex, make them feel very special, and give them free lunch and M&Ms.

Ok, so I’m being flippant, but Google’s still using the Googleplex as a means to make nice with the potential next American president.

Five White House hopefuls from both Republican and Democratic parties have stopped by Google’s Silicon Valley campus in recent months to face questions and endear themselves with voters in the country’s most populous state.

Google has an impressive list of those that have spoken:

  • Ron Paul
  • John McCain
  • John Edwards
  • Hillary Clinton
  • (no idea who the fifth is)Bill Richardson

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Cisco Acquires Social Networks Company, Why?

posted on July 30, 2007

VentureBeat seems to understand why Cisco just acquired Five Across, a San Francisco company that helps companies build their own social networks. Unfortunately, I’m having a had time believing this is a good decision.

The move is understandable, though. Based on conversations with three or four different Cisco executives in recent months, it is clear Cisco sees social networking and the wider Web 2.0 phenomenon as ways to drive Internet traffic, and thus traffic over their routers and other networking gear – and, it follows, more revenue for Cisco.

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Why Microsoft May Lose Mobile Market to Google

posted on July 30, 2007

It’s interesting to read Microsoft’s Bill Gates rip into the notion that Google can become a successful competitor in the mobile space.

Gates told the Times it was unlikely that Google would be able to make inroads into Microsoft’s share of the market for mobile phone software.

“How many products, of all the Google products that have been introduced, how many of them are profit-making products?” the Times quoted Gates as saying.

“They’ve introduced about 30 different products; they have one profit-making product. So you’re now making a prediction without ever seeing the software that they’re going to have the world’s best phone and it’s going to be free?” the paper quoted him as saying.

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Google Copyright Filter Coming to YouTube this Fall

posted on July 30, 2007

Sometime this Fall, Google will rollout a copyright filtering system for YouTube and try to catch infringements before they’re posted.

At a court hearing related to Viacom’s (and many others) law suit against the video service, YouTube attorney Philip Beck revealed they’re working on a system that would only take a few minutes to determine if a clip is copyrighted material. Unfortunately, Beck was somewhat vague on when Google would have the screening in place. Clarification from Google doesn’t help either:

“We hope to have the testing completed and technology available by sometime in the Fall,” said a Google spokesman in an e-mail. “But this is one of the most technologically complicated tasks that we have ever undertaken, and as always with cutting-edge technologies, it’s difficult to forecast specific launch dates.”

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Watch Marketing Pilgrim Live: Get a Pownce Invite

posted on July 29, 2007

Marketing Pilgrim Live – our weekly live look at internet marketing news – has found a new regular time: Tuesday’s 1:30pm ET.

If you’ve not tuned into the show – and shared your views and questions – we have an extra incentive for you. During this week’s live show I’ll give away 5 invites to Pownce.

Of course, you can always subscribe to the video feed and catch the show later, but you’ll miss out on the live chat room and your chance to get a Pownce invite. ;-)

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Social Networking is Not Always a Popularity Contest

posted on July 29, 2007

Now that I have just about every popular social network profile under the sun, I wanted to share an observation: Having a social network is not just a popularity contest.

Sure, the younger you are, the more you may want to be liked and show-off your popularity – that’s part of the reason why MySpace has become so popular. Once you get out into the real world (boy do I sound like my parents), you’ll realize that life is not always about “he who has the most friends wins.”

Take a look at where popularity works and where it doesn’t.

Twitter – there’s no harm in letting countless numbers follow your Tweets, but do you really need to follow the micro-updates of people you don’t know?